Happy Thanksgiving!

-
It's one of my favorite days of the year! It's also perhaps the only day I willingly and excitedly wake up early. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is one of my favorite past times. I'm settled into my lady lair (where the digital antenna can actually pull in NBC) with a glass of sparkling wine with a splash of cherry juice (yum!) And Paleo cinnamon rolls are almost done baking in the oven.

The Meal
Mr. Nomadreader and I are once again hosting my parents and grandmother for a Thanksgiving feast. The main event this year is a maple and spiced apple cider brined pork loin. It's been in the brine for 24 hours, and I cannot wait to taste it. Hosting Thanksgiving is a newer tradition, but this is the third year in a row we've done it. I particularly love not having to travel, so I can just relax and enjoy a long weekend with family...and books. I'm blessed he does most of the cooking while I enjoy the parade too!

The Rest of the Day...and the weekend
After the big meal is over, I'm looking forward to a quiet evening reading by the Christmas tree. I'm currently devouring Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann (I adored Game Change) and enjoying my first Philippa Gregory novel, The Lady in the River. I hope to finish both this weekend during Thankfully Reading. I'm planning to devote the rest of the year to reading the 2013 releases I haven't read yet, as well as continuing to read 2014 releases to be ahead when the new year begins. I'm also still tweaking a few things on the new blog design. I'm really pleased with it so far and have enjoyed reading your comments and reactions to it!

Giving thanks
Two years ago in my Thanksgiving post, I gave thanks to Mr. Nomadreader, my job, this blog, being home, and winter. If I were making the list today, it would look much the same. Home is now our house, and it's particularly special to be spending our first holidays in a house I hope to live in for many, many years. In a year I contemplated giving up this blog many, many times, I'm particularly thankful to have found my way back to the joy of blogging. Much of that is a credit to you, my readers. When I started blogging almost seven years ago, I guarded my privacy fiercely. I never could have imagined how close I would come to be with so many other book bloggers. It all started with leaving comments on each other's blogs, but I'm thankful to call so many book bloggers friends. I'm thankful for all of our interactions on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. I never thought I would be Facebook friends with people I have never met in real life, but I feel I know so many of you so well after years of virtual communicating about books and life. This blog has brought me more joy than I could have ever imagined, and I look forward to many more years of it.

Now tell me: what are you thankful for this year?

Comments

  1. (Diane) Bibliophile By the SeaNovember 28, 2013 at 1:34 PM

    Happy Thanksgiving Carrie

    ReplyDelete
  2. Laurie CNovember 29, 2013 at 11:01 AM

    Happy Thanksgiving! This is our first year of holidays with all our children grown and graduated from college, and I'm thankful that they are all still coming home for Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas this year. Hope your meal went well. The pork loin sounds delicious!

    ReplyDelete
  3. LindseyNovember 29, 2013 at 5:38 PM

    Your Thanksgiving morning sounds a lot like ours, at least with regards to cinnamon rolls and the parade! I hope you had a fantastic weekend and got lots of reading done. :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment. Happy reading!

Popular posts from this blog

book review: A Dangerous Place by Jacqueline Winspear

-
Image
The backstory: A Dangerous Place  is the eleventh historical mystery featuring Maisie Dobbs. My reviews of the other eleven (plus Winspear's stand alone historical novel) are in my Book Review Database . The basics: Set four years after the last Maisie Dobbs novel, Leaving Everything Most Loved , in A Dangerous Place , we meet up with Maisie in Gibraltar in 1927 during the Spanish Civil War. She gets off her England-bound ship in Gibraltar because she's not quite ready to return. Note: this review contains spoilers about what happened in those four years of Maisie's life between books, all of which are revealed in this novel's first thirty pages.  My thoughts: Sunday I wrote about the Maisie Mail I received. These postcards appear in the book itself, along with many others. After setting the stage in Gibraltar in the opening pages (Maisie stumbles upon a dead body), Winspear recounts the last four years of Maisie's life in the form of postcards, letters, an...
Read more

book review: Run by Ann Patchett

-
Image
The backstory: After loving State of Wonder  ( my review ), I set out to read all of Ann Patchett's books. The basics: Run  is the story of the Doyle family: Bernard, an Irish Catholic ex-mayor of Boston, his deceased wife Bernadette, their adult son Sullivan, and their two adopted college ages sons, Tip and Teddy, who are biological brothers. My thoughts: I'm beginning to think Ann Patchett is my soul sister. Her writing reaches me deeply, and I've adored everything she's written. It was a special treat to read Run , the novel of hers I knew the least about going in. Although I had the framework of two of her novels and one memoir, I didn't know what to expect. Run  isn't as universally loved as some of her other works, so I was particularly curious to see how it measured up. Admittedly, Run  started off slowly for me. It took two chapters to really get into the heart of the story, but once it happened, I was hooked. One of the things I love most about ...
Read more

book review: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

-
Image
The backstory: Gilead  won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2004, and was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2006. The basics: As Rev. Ames nears the end of his life in the 1950's, he begins a letter to his young son because Ames realizes his son is too young to really know him. Gilead  is that letter. My thoughts: Gilead  is a novel I'm been meaning to read for years. It's a character-driven, Midwestern narrative by one of our best contemporary writers. It should be a novel I love, yet I struggled to finish it and admit I was wowed by neither the story nor the writing. Gilead  seemed almost stream-of-consciousness at first. I appreciated that Robinson jumped right in: this novel is a letter from father to son; the reader's ignorance of these two characters is not the focus. As the novel progressed, more details began to be filled in, and the reader begins to understand the characters, setting and purpose. I enjoyed the ...
Read more